Ulf Meißner#
A laudatio by Muhsin N.Harakeh#
The main theme of Meissner’s research is in one of the most challenging fields of contemporary theoretical physics - strong interactions. Early in his career, he has made major contributions to low-energy hadron physics in the framework of topological chiral soliton models. He has developed together with colleagues the three-flavour Narnbu-Jona-Lasinio model that has widely been used afterwards to study the behaviour of mesons in hot and dense matter. In particular, his ground-breaking work on vector meson masses has gained much recognition.
During his Heisenberg fellowship, he started working on chiral perturbation theory (CHPT) and performed the first two—loop calculation in two-flavour CHPT. In a sequence of papers with colleagues he established the role of chiral loops for the structure of the nucleon, and revised the low-energy theorems of electromagnetic pion production. This led to a variety of predictions that were later verified at various experimental facilities. With various students, he thoroughly investigated the nucleon form factors, pion-nucleon scattering and three flavour extensions. This pioneering work firmly established this line of research world-wide.
In the last decade, he extended these methods to study the quark mass dependence of baryon observables, which has become an indispensible tool to analyze data from lattice simulations at unphysical quark masses, He has been working on the dispersion—theoretical analysis of the nucleon electromagnetic form factors. This has become a standard tool in the field. Following a proposal by Weinberg, he did with students and colleagues the first high precision calculation of two—nucleon forces in the framework of nuclear chiral effective field theory and worked out the three-nucleon forces, the quark mass dependence of nuclear forces, lryperon-nucleon interactions and applied this scheme successfully to a large variety of observables. This framework has opened a new area of nuclear physics in terms of a direct connection to the underlying theory of strong interactions - Quantum Chrorno Dynamics - and also for the first time gives a direct connection between the structure of the nucleon and of nuclei. Other recent work of large impact was done in the fields of unitarised effective field theory, in the theory of pionic and kaonic hydrogen, meson production in proton-proton collisions and the systematic analysis of proton- antiproton final-state interactions in heavy meson decays and electron-positron annihilation.
The pioneering work and outstanding research career of Meissner has won him early international recognition. He has offered several chairs/directorships in nuclear and subatomic physics in Europe, He accepted a combined position to direct two Institutes - the Theory Group of the HISKP at Bonn and the IKP-3 at FZ Jülich, This combined group is considered one of the world-leading theory groups in hadronic physics and effective field theory. This is reflected e.g. by the fact that he has been selected as the coordinator of the FP 6 theory network "Hadron Physics Theory" involving 19 institutions and 78 senior scientists and have also been asked to lead the network "QCDnet" within the hadron physics FP 7 framework comprising IOO senior scientists from 27 organisations. He is also the spokesperson of the virtual institute "Spin and strong QCD" funded by the Helmholtz society in which scientists from Germany, Italy, Poland and Switzerland work on theoretical as well as experimental issues in non-perturbative QCD, Furthermore, he is the spokesperson of the DFG collaborative research centre TR 16 "Subnuclear structure of matter" of the Universities of Bonn, Bochum and Giellen for the second funding period,
The work of Meissner is widely recognised with about 12000 citations under SPIRES and he has been ranked 161 on the SPIRES list of all time-highly cited theory authors in 2004 and placed 55 in the five year period 1997-2002.
Meissner regularly performs large scale reviews for various funding agencies world-wide and has been or is member of various Program Advisory Committees of accelerator facilities.
Other indicators of his outstanding achievements are the substantial third-party funding received, the large number of talks at international conferences and the nomination as conference chairman for two large meetings - "Chiral Dynamics IV" at Bonn in 2003 and "Few-Body IXX" at Bonn in 2009, Also, since 2007, he is the Editor-in-Chief of "The European Physical Journal A - Hadrons and Nuclei".
It is also important to mention that in addition to his outstanding research achievements, Meissner has been heavily involved in teaching at both the graduate and the undergraduate levels. He has supervised many young physicists - 19 Diplom students, 20 Ph,D, and 17 Postdocs - some of whom went on to have a very successful scientific career and become professors or senior scientist at various universities and institutions.
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